Essential Dykes To Watch Out For

Description

On publication in 2006, Alison Bechdel''s Fun Home was hailed as one of the

masterpieces of the graphic form. Time magazine chose it as the best book

of that year and critics on both sides of the Atlantic praised it for its

emotional complexity and the seriousness of its writing. Nick Hornby called

it ''as satisfying a literary experience as you are likely to have this

year''. Long before Fun Home, however, Alison Bechdel had been chronicling

the lives of a small universe of cartoon characters in her strip Dykes To

Watch Out For, which is syndicated in fifty alternative newspapers in the

USA and has been published in eleven volumes. Now, at last, The Essential

Dykes To Watch Out For gathers the best of those volumes, together with

sixty of the newest strips. Bechdel''s brilliantly imagined counter-cultural

band of friends – academics, social workers, booksellers – fall in and out

of love, negotiate relationships, raise children, switch careers and cope

wtih aging parents. The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For fuses high and low

culture – from foreign domestic policy to domestic routine, postmodern

theory to hot sex – in a serial graphic narrative ''suitable for all

humanist persuasions''.